OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Training of Robust Traditional Chinese LLaMA-1B on a Single Consumer GPU: Continual Pre-training, SFT, and DPO
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Small Language Models (SLMs) enable cost-effective, on-device and latency-sensitive AI applications, yet their deployment in Traditional Chinese (TC) remains hindered by token-level instability - models unpredictably emit non-TC characters or code-switch into other languages. We address this practical reliability gap by creating PureTC-1B, a three-stage stabilization pipeline for Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct (an open-weight, instruction-tuned model released by Meta) using parameter-efficient LoRA adapters. Our method combines Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on TC-centric corpora, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with instruction data, and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using TC-adherence preferences to improve monolingual robustness without full-model retraining. On a benchmark designed to simulate real-world usage, PureTC-1B achieves a 51.3% relative reduction (micro-average) in non-TC output tokens versus the base model. On a Named Entity Translation (NET) task, PureTC-1B further reduces incorrect-language tokens by 77.2% relative to Llama-3B and 57.2% relative to Qwen-1.5B, indicating that robust TC adherence is attainable even at the 1B scale. The pipeline is reproducible, adapter-only, and hardware-friendly, offering practitioners a practical recipe to enhance language stability for TC and potentially other non-English languages.
Learning to Decide with Just Enough: Information-Theoretic Context Summarization for CMDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) offer a framework for sequential decision-making under external signals, but existing methods often fail to generalize in high-dimensional or unstructured contexts, resulting in excessive computation and unstable performance. We propose an information-theoretic summarization approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to compress contextual inputs into low-dimensional, semantically rich summaries. These summaries augment states by preserving decision-critical cues while reducing redundancy. Building on the notion of approximate context sufficiency, we provide, to our knowledge, the first regret bounds and a latency-entropy trade-off characterization for CMDPs. Our analysis clarifies how informativeness impacts computational cost. Experiments across discrete, continuous, visual, and recommendation benchmarks show that our method outperforms raw-context and non-context baselines, improving reward, success rate, and sample efficiency, while reducing latency and memory usage. These findings demonstrate that LLM-based summarization offers a scalable and interpretable solution for efficient decision-making in context-rich, resource-constrained environments.
Posterior Collapse as a Phase Transition in Variational Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the phenomenon of posterior collapse in variational autoencoders (VAEs) from the perspective of statistical physics, and reveal that it constitutes a phase transition governed jointly by data structure and model hyper-parameters. By analyzing the stability of the trivial solution associated with posterior collapse, we identify a critical hyper-parameter threshold. In particular, we derive an explicit criterion for the onset of collapse: posterior collapse occurs when the decoder variance exceeds the largest eigenvalue of the data covariance matrix. This critical boundary, separating meaningful latent inference from collapse, is characterized by a discontinuity in the KL divergence between the approximate posterior and the prior distribution, where the KL divergence and its derivatives exhibit clear non-analytic behavior. We validate this critical behavior on both synthetic and real-world datasets, confirming the existence of a phase transition. The experimental results align well with our theoretical predictions, demonstrating the robustness of our collapse criterion across various VAE architectures. Our stability-based analysis demonstrate that posterior collapse is not merely an optimization failure, but rather an emerging phase transition arising from the interplay between data structure and variational constraints. This perspective offers new insights into the trainability and representational capacity of deep generative models.
Source-Free Cross-Domain Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Although existing cross-domain continual learning approaches successfully address many streaming tasks having domain shifts, they call for a fully labeled source domain hindering their feasibility in the privacy constrained environments. This paper goes one step ahead with the problem of source-free cross-domain continual learning where the use of source-domain samples are completely prohibited. We propose the idea of rehearsal-free frequency-aware dynamic prompt collaborations (REFEREE) to cope with the absence of labeled source-domain samples in realm of cross-domain continual learning. REFEREE is built upon a synergy between a source-pre-trained model and a large-scale vision-language model, thus overcoming the problem of sub-optimal generalizations when relying only on a source pre-trained model. The domain shift problem between the source domain and the target domain is handled by a frequency-aware prompting technique encouraging low-frequency components while suppressing high-frequency components. This strategy generates frequency-aware augmented samples, robust against noisy pseudo labels. The noisy pseudo-label problem is further addressed with the uncertainty-aware weighting strategy where the mean and covariance matrix are weighted by prediction uncertainties, thus mitigating the adverse effects of the noisy pseudo label. Besides, the issue of catastrophic forgetting (CF) is overcome by kernel linear discriminant analysis (KLDA) where the backbone network is frozen while the classification is performed using the linear discriminant analysis approach guided by the random kernel method. Our rigorous numerical studies confirm the advantage of our approach where it beats prior arts having access to source domain samples with significant margins.
LadderMoE: Ladder-Side Mixture of Experts Adapters for Bronze Inscription Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Bronze inscriptions (BI), engraved on ritual vessels, constitute a crucial stage of early Chinese writing and provide indispensable evidence for archaeological and historical studies. However, automatic BI recognition remains difficult due to severe visual degradation, multi-domain variability across photographs, rubbings, and tracings, and an extremely long-tailed character distribution. To address these challenges, we curate a large-scale BI dataset comprising 22454 full-page images and 198598 annotated characters spanning 6658 unique categories, enabling robust cross-domain evaluation. Building on this resource, we develop a two-stage detection-recognition pipeline that first localizes inscriptions and then transcribes individual characters. To handle heterogeneous domains and rare classes, we equip the pipeline with LadderMoE, which augments a pretrained CLIP encoder with ladder-style MoE adapters, enabling dynamic expert specialization and stronger robustness. Comprehensive experiments on single-character and full-page recognition tasks demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art scene text recognition baselines, achieving superior accuracy across head, mid, and tail categories as well as all acquisition modalities. These results establish a strong foundation for bronze inscription recognition and downstream archaeological analysis.
Shift-Invariant Attribute Scoring for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks via Shapley Value
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

For many real-world applications, understanding feature-outcome relationships is as crucial as achieving high predictive accuracy. While traditional neural networks excel at prediction, their black-box nature obscures underlying functional relationships. Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (KANs) address this by employing learnable spline-based activation functions on edges, enabling recovery of symbolic representations while maintaining competitive performance. However, KAN's architecture presents unique challenges for network pruning. Conventional magnitude-based methods become unreliable due to sensitivity to input coordinate shifts. We propose \textbf{ShapKAN}, a pruning framework using Shapley value attribution to assess node importance in a shift-invariant manner. Unlike magnitude-based approaches, ShapKAN quantifies each node's actual contribution, ensuring consistent importance rankings regardless of input parameterization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapKAN preserves true node importance while enabling effective network compression. Our approach improves KAN's interpretability advantages, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments.
Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are an increasingly deployed class of agents that take actions on GUIs to accomplish user goals. In this paper, we show that CUAs consistently exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness (BGD): a bias to pursue goals regardless of feasibility, safety, reliability, or context. We characterize three prevalent patterns of BGD: (i) lack of contextual reasoning, (ii) assumptions and decisions under ambiguity, and (iii) contradictory or infeasible goals. We develop BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks capturing these three patterns. Built on OSWorld, BLIND-ACT provides realistic environments and employs LLM-based judges to evaluate agent behavior, achieving 93.75% agreement with human annotations. We use BLIND-ACT to evaluate nine frontier models, including Claude Sonnet and Opus 4, Computer-Use-Preview, and GPT-5, observing high average BGD rates (80.8%) across them. We show that BGD exposes subtle risks that arise even when inputs are not directly harmful. While prompting-based interventions lower BGD levels, substantial risk persists, highlighting the need for stronger training- or inference-time interventions. Qualitative analysis reveals observed failure modes: execution-first bias (focusing on how to act over whether to act), thought-action disconnect (execution diverging from reasoning), and request-primacy (justifying actions due to user request). Identifying BGD and introducing BLIND-ACT establishes a foundation for future research on studying and mitigating this fundamental risk and ensuring safe CUA deployment.
A Locally Executable AI System for Improving Preoperative Patient Communication: A Multi-Domain Clinical Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Patients awaiting invasive procedures often have unanswered pre-procedural questions; however, time-pressured workflows and privacy constraints limit personalized counseling. We present LENOHA (Low Energy, No Hallucination, Leave No One Behind Architecture), a safety-first, local-first system that routes inputs with a high-precision sentence-transformer classifier and returns verbatim answers from a clinician-curated FAQ for clinical queries, eliminating free-text generation in the clinical path. We evaluated two domains (tooth extraction and gastroscopy) using expert-reviewed validation sets (n=400/domain) for thresholding and independent test sets (n=200/domain). Among the four encoders, E5-large-instruct (560M) achieved an overall accuracy of 0.983 (95% CI 0.964-0.991), AUC 0.996, and seven total errors, which were statistically indistinguishable from GPT-4o on this task; Gemini made no errors on this test set. Energy logging shows that the non-generative clinical path consumes ~1.0 mWh per input versus ~168 mWh per small-talk reply from a local 8B SLM, a ~170x difference, while maintaining ~0.10 s latency on a single on-prem GPU. These results indicate that near-frontier discrimination and generation-induced errors are structurally avoided in the clinical path by returning vetted FAQ answers verbatim, supporting privacy, sustainability, and equitable deployment in bandwidth-limited environments.
Uncovering Overconfident Failures in CXR Models via Augmentation-Sensitivity Risk Scoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning models achieve strong performance in chest radiograph (CXR) interpretation, yet fairness and reliability concerns persist. Models often show uneven accuracy across patient subgroups, leading to hidden failures not reflected in aggregate metrics. Existing error detection approaches -- based on confidence calibration or out-of-distribution (OOD) detection -- struggle with subtle within-distribution errors, while image- and representation-level consistency-based methods remain underexplored in medical imaging. We propose an augmentation-sensitivity risk scoring (ASRS) framework to identify error-prone CXR cases. ASRS applies clinically plausible rotations ($\pm 15^\circ$/$\pm 30^\circ$) and measures embedding shifts with the RAD-DINO encoder. Sensitivity scores stratify samples into stability quartiles, where highly sensitive cases show substantially lower recall ($-0.2$ to $-0.3$) despite high AUROC and confidence. ASRS provides a label-free means for selective prediction and clinician review, improving fairness and safety in medical AI.
Improving AGI Evaluation: A Data Science Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Evaluation of potential AGI systems and methods is difficult due to the breadth of the engineering goal. We have no methods for perfect evaluation of the end state, and instead measure performance on small tests designed to provide directional indication that we are approaching AGI. In this work we argue that AGI evaluation methods have been dominated by a design philosophy that uses our intuitions of what intelligence is to create synthetic tasks, that have performed poorly in the history of AI. Instead we argue for an alternative design philosophy focused on evaluating robust task execution that seeks to demonstrate AGI through competence. This perspective is developed from common practices in data science that are used to show that a system can be reliably deployed. We provide practical examples of what this would mean for AGI evaluation.
Towards Imperceptible Adversarial Defense: A Gradient-Driven Shield against Facial Manipulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

With the flourishing prosperity of generative models, manipulated facial images have become increasingly accessible, raising concerns regarding privacy infringement and societal trust. In response, proactive defense strategies embed adversarial perturbations into facial images to counter deepfake manipulation. However, existing methods often face a tradeoff between imperceptibility and defense effectiveness-strong perturbations may disrupt forgeries but degrade visual fidelity. Recent studies have attempted to address this issue by introducing additional visual loss constraints, yet often overlook the underlying gradient conflicts among losses, ultimately weakening defense performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a gradient-projection-based adversarial proactive defense (GRASP) method that effectively counters facial deepfakes while minimizing perceptual degradation. GRASP is the first approach to successfully integrate both structural similarity loss and low-frequency loss to enhance perturbation imperceptibility. By analyzing gradient conflicts between defense effectiveness loss and visual quality losses, GRASP pioneers the design of the gradient-projection mechanism to mitigate these conflicts, enabling balanced optimization that preserves image fidelity without sacrificing defensive performance. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of GRASP, achieving a PSNR exceeding 40 dB, SSIM of 0.99, and a 100% defense success rate against facial attribute manipulations, significantly outperforming existing approaches in visual quality.
VaPR -- Vision-language Preference alignment for Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Preference finetuning methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with AI-generated feedback have shown promise in aligning Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with human preferences. However, existing techniques overlook the prevalence of noise in synthetic preference annotations in the form of stylistic and length biases. To this end, we introduce a hard-negative response generation framework based on LLM-guided response editing, that produces rejected responses with targeted errors, maintaining stylistic and length similarity to the accepted ones. Using this framework, we develop the VaPR dataset, comprising 30K high-quality samples, to finetune three LVLM families: LLaVA-V1.5, Qwen2VL & Qwen2.5VL (2B-13B sizes). Our VaPR models deliver significant performance improvements across ten benchmarks, achieving average gains of 6.5% (LLaVA), 4.0% (Qwen2VL), and 1.5% (Qwen2.5VL), with notable improvements on reasoning tasks. A scaling analysis shows that performance consistently improves with data size, with LLaVA models benefiting even at smaller scales. Moreover, VaPR reduces the tendency to answer "Yes" in binary questions - addressing a common failure mode in LVLMs like LLaVA. Lastly, we show that the framework generalizes to open-source LLMs as editors, with models trained on VaPR-OS achieving ~99% of the performance of models trained on \name, which is synthesized using GPT-4o. Our data, models, and code can be found on the project page https://vap-r.github.io
FOSS-chain: using blockchain for Open Source Software license compliance
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Open Source Software (OSS) is widely used and carries licenses that indicate the terms under which the software is provided for use, also specifying modification and distribution rules. Ensuring that users are respecting OSS license terms when creating derivative works is a complex process. Compliance issues arising from incompatibilities among licenses may lead to legal disputes. At the same time, the blockchain technology with immutable entries offers a mechanism to provide transparency when it comes to licensing and ensure software changes are recorded. In this work, we are introducing an integration of blockchain and license management when creating derivative works, in order to tackle the issue of OSS license compatibility. We have designed, implemented and performed a preliminary evaluation of FOSS-chain, a web platform that uses blockchain and automates the license compliance process, covering 14 OSS licenses. We have evaluated the initial prototype version of the FOSS-chain platform via a small scale user study. Our preliminary results are promising, demonstrating the potential of the platform for adaptation on realistic software systems.
A cybersecurity AI agent selection and decision support framework
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents a novel, structured decision support framework that systematically aligns diverse artificial intelligence (AI) agent architectures, reactive, cognitive, hybrid, and learning, with the comprehensive National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0. By integrating agent theory with industry guidelines, this framework provides a transparent and stepwise methodology for selecting and deploying AI solutions to address contemporary cyber threats. Employing a granular decomposition of NIST CSF 2.0 functions into specific tasks, the study links essential AI agent properties such as autonomy, adaptive learning, and real-time responsiveness to each subcategory's security requirements. In addition, it outlines graduated levels of autonomy (assisted, augmented, and fully autonomous) to accommodate organisations at varying stages of cybersecurity maturity. This holistic approach transcends isolated AI applications, providing a unified detection, incident response, and governance strategy. Through conceptual validation, the framework demonstrates how tailored AI agent deployments can align with real-world constraints and risk profiles, enhancing situational awareness, accelerating response times, and fortifying long-term resilience via adaptive risk management. Ultimately, this research bridges the gap between theoretical AI constructs and operational cybersecurity demands, establishing a foundation for robust, empirically validated multi-agent systems that adhere to industry standards.
A Linear Programming Approach to Estimate the Core in Cooperative Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to approximate the core of transferable utility (TU) cooperative games via linear programming. Given the computational hardness of determining the full core, our approach provides a tractable approximation by sampling extreme points through randomized linear problems (LPs). We analyze its convergence and computational complexity, and validate its effectiveness through extensive simulations on various game models. Our results show that the method is scalable and achieves high accuracy in terms of core reconstruction.
Can LLMs Refuse Questions They Do Not Know? Measuring Knowledge-Aware Refusal in Factual Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) should refuse to answer questions beyond their knowledge. This capability, which we term knowledge-aware refusal, is crucial for factual reliability. However, existing metrics fail to faithfully measure this ability. On the one hand, simple refusal-based metrics are biased by refusal rates and yield inconsistent scores when models exhibit different refusal tendencies. On the other hand, existing calibration metrics are proxy-based, capturing the performance of auxiliary calibration processes rather than the model's actual refusal behavior. In this work, we propose the Refusal Index (RI), a principled metric that measures how accurately LLMs refuse questions they do not know. We define RI as Spearman's rank correlation between refusal probability and error probability. To make RI practically measurable, we design a lightweight two-pass evaluation method that efficiently estimates RI from observed refusal rates across two standard evaluation runs. Extensive experiments across 16 models and 5 datasets demonstrate that RI accurately quantifies a model's intrinsic knowledge-aware refusal capability in factual tasks. Notably, RI remains stable across different refusal rates and provides consistent model rankings independent of a model's overall accuracy and refusal rates. More importantly, RI provides insight into an important but previously overlooked aspect of LLM factuality: while LLMs achieve high accuracy on factual tasks, their refusal behavior can be unreliable and fragile. This finding highlights the need to complement traditional accuracy metrics with the Refusal Index for comprehensive factuality evaluation.